Joel-Peter Witkin is a photographer whose images of the human condition are undeniably powerful. For more than forty years, he has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world in which we exist. Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin pursues this complex issue through people most often cast aside by society-human spectacles including hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynies, carcasses, people with odd physical anomalies, fetishists, and “any living myth… anyone bearing the wounds of Christ”. His fascination with other people’s physicality has inspired works that confront our sense of normalcy and decency while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity.

In Joel-Peter Witkin’s world, death is not to be feared. Instead, there is beauty in the macabre, and some humor there too, as evidenced from his lifelong career creating photographs that evoke a range of reactions from outrage to wonder. With still lifes featuring dismembered body parts, and portraits of transsexual people posed in classical art forms, Witkin’s brand of subversiveness has established him as one of the most important contemporary photographers today. 

On the occasion of the December 2022 print edition of A.i.A., the Religion Issue, we revisit this article from February 1997 that also explores how religion can play a significant role in shaping artists’ world views and artwork. In this case, Eleanor Heartney considered the link between Catholicism and four artists—Robert Mapplethorpe, Kiki Smith, Andres Serrano, and Joel-Peter Witkin—who became favorite targets of the political and religious right in the 1990s.

Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Ft. Worth, TX takes on the history of how photography was used on Native Americans and how its increasingly being used by Native Americans. It stands as one of the first major museum surveys exploring the practices of Indigenous photographers working today.

Speaking with Light expresses what it means to live in contemporary Native North America through the lenses of young and mid-career artists such as Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unanga), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), as well as their generational forebears, including Shelley Niro (Member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk), Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), Zig Jackson (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) and the late Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee).

Joel-Peter Witkin: The Early Works, an exhibition consisting of twenty-four vintage photographic prints by one of the most idiosyncratic and recognizable photographers of the 20th century. With images spanning 1950 to 1978 – many of which are unique and have not yet been displayed – this exhibition offers the viewer rare insight into the origins of the artist’s innovative and distinctive vision.

Power Lines engages with the forced physical assimilation of Native people and a process of psychological assimilation through the artifice of Hollywood and popular culture. With a nod to the growing field of Indigenous Futures, Sense’s works gesture in multiple directions, through the past and present, as well as toward a generative space of future preservation and possibility. She transforms source material, including colonial letters and maps from the archives of the British Library, into contemporary artifacts that allude to the retrieval of ancestral ways of being. The mathematics at play in the work, represented by the numbers inherent in weaving patterns, offer a further form of meaning in an increasingly uncertain world.

A new exhibition at the Staller Center’s Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, entitled “Revisiting 5+1,” examines a critical moment at the junction of abstract art, racial and gender politics, and student activism at Stony Brook University. The exhibition is a reflection on the historic 1969 exhibition of abstract art “5+1,” presenting works by the original artists alongside a new selection of major works by Black women working in abstraction.

Sarah Sense is a descendant of two Native American tribes (Chitimacha and Choctaw), a world traveller, and Eccles Centre Fellow. She uses Native weaving techniques to create artworks combining archival materials and landscape photography. With support from the Eccles Centre, she created Power Lines – a powerful series of work utilising colonial maps and letters found in the British Library’s Americas collection.